Dawarich product updates, guides and location history news.
"I swiped Dawarich away and now it doesn't track. My day has a hole in it. Bug?"
Not a bug. On iPhone, whether the Dawarich app keeps tracking after you close it depends on the tracking mode. On Android it keeps working, unless your phone's manufacturer decided otherwise.
Hello there, good people, Evgenii from Dawarich here! This question comes up every couple of weeks — on Reddit, in GitHub issues, in our Discord — so I figured it deserves a proper answer in one place instead of scattered comments.
The question is: Dawarich itself is open source, so why aren't the official mobile apps? Short answer: the paid features in the apps are how we hope to one day work on Dawarich full-time. Longer answer below.
Every location sharing app answers the same question — where is she right now? — and almost all of them answer it well. The question they answer very differently is the one you only ask later: who else gets that location, how long is it kept, and can you take it back?
I build Dawarich, so I'm biased. I've tried to be fair anyway, including about the things other apps do better.
Hi there, my dear Dawarich people!
Evgenii here, the developer of Dawarich, a free, open-source, self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.
Eight releases since my last update, and we're now at 1.15.3. Some fun map things, some integrations with other self-hosted apps, and a lot of work on the rough edges you brought up in the comments. Thank you for those, by the way :)
It is March. You have a year of client visits to account for, a spreadsheet with eleven rows in it, and a memory that gets vague somewhere around September.
The information exists. Your phone recorded it. What it did not record is why you drove to an address in Hamburg on a Tuesday in April, and that is the column a tax office cares about most.
So let me be upfront about what this post is. Dawarich is not tax software. It doesn't know your country's rules, it can't tell a client visit from a trip to the garden centre, and it won't hand you a document you can file. What it does is remember dates and distances, which is the part nobody can reconstruct nine months later. The rest is you doing a small amount of work at the right time instead of a large amount of work in March.
Hey, it's been a minute.
Dawarich is still your favorite FOSS, self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline. Since the last update, a lot has shipped: better maps, public sharing, flight history, a redesigned trip experience, mobile app updates, safer imports, and a small detour into changelogs, roadmaps, and posters.
GitHub: github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: dawarich.app
Guess what, in the last post I totally forgot it's Dawarich's second birthday!
Ah yes: Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline. Now with an actual proper timeline!
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
Funny cat: https://i0.wp.com/katzenworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/funny-cat.jpeg?w=1920&ssl=1
Yeah, Dawarich started mid-March 2024, so happy birthday to us!
Long time no see huh? I mean the last update was about a month ago, but I couldn't wait till summer to share new exciting stuff that we built into Dawarich in last four weeks.
As always, Dawarich is your favorite free open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline. Now with the official apps for both iOS and Android.
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
So! More screenshots than text this time.
So you've exported your Google Timeline data. Maybe you heard about the shutdown and panic-downloaded everything. Maybe you just wanted to see what Google knows about you. Either way, you now have a ZIP file sitting on your desktop, and you're staring at a bunch of JSON thinking "what am I looking at?"
I maintain Dawarich, which imports all of these formats, so I've spent more time than I'd like reading Google's location JSON. Here's everything I know about what's inside your export — every field, every quirk, every format Google has shipped over the years.
Google Timeline is, for most practical purposes, dead. The web version is gone, the data lives on your phone now, and people are still discovering that years of their location history vanished in the transition. If you're reading this, you probably already know all that.
So what are the actual options in 2026? I went through the most popular alternatives, ranked them by how well they replace what Google Timeline used to do, and tried to be honest about the trade-offs — including the ones that apply to my own project.